Addicts of the New

Many library users (and librarians) haunt the New Books shelves, and pay close attention to the audio books and DVDs which have just arrived. To make this easier, all the What's New lists have been updated. These represent mostly recently purchased materials; but also include donations, replacement copies which are not new to the system, and titles which have JUST been ordered. A number of really current books on CD have just turned up in the database. Examples in the cover images below. If you search the catalog by call number for CD, then tell it to sort with Newest First, it will have to think about it for quite a while, but then will show the most recent dates on top.

You can always place hold requests on the materials which have not arrived yet (and on the ones other people are already standing in line for...)

The Weather's More Like Spring

We don't have architects' notes this week, only the photos; but clearly the sea of concrete which will underlie the floor of the Southside Library is continuing to grow.

What People Want to Read, II

These are books people asked for at the Main Library reference desk, in part of a recent afternoon:

Ahab's wife, or, The star-gazer : a novel / by Sena Jeter Naslund
The red tent / Anita Diamant
Making the mummies dance : inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art / Thomas Hoving
The botany of desire : a plant's-eye view of the world / Michael Pollan
Raising Cain : protecting the emotional life of boys / Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson
Reviving Ophelia : saving the selves of adolescent girls / Mary Pipher
three Walter Mosley titles, none of them the current one
The valley below / Alice Lee Marriott
Life Planning In New Mexico / Merri Rudd.
two Fred Alan Wolf titles
Chocolate : a bittersweet saga of dark and light / Mort Rosenblum
a David Frawley title, Yoga and the Sacred Fire, that we don't own though we have others of his books; we put in an interlibrary loan request for it

Nobody Home

Today's a holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. The libraries are closed. See you all tomorrow.

Save It Twice

The Friends of the Library will be selling 3.5" diskettes in their Bookstore at the Main Library for the users of the library's computers. During hours when the bookstore is not open, diskettes will be available at the reference desk. The cost is $1.00.

A long time ago one of the staff of the city's computer department told us this: "There are two kinds of users. Those who have lost data, and those who haven't lost data YET." Keep yourself in the second column by making sure you have two copies of every important file. The one on your harddrive AND the backup copy. Two backup copies, even. If your only PC is the one you use at the library, save it TWICE, to two different diskettes, or email yourself a copy as an attachment. Diskettes die, sometimes with the only copy of important newly revised documents on them. Bypass this trouble by saving early and often :-)

What People Want To Read

The list of titles with the most holds on them has been updated. It's always on the web page as Books You're Willing to Wait in Line For. (In house, we call it 'the manyholds list.')

Knowing about what people want to read is one of the most fun parts of our work. Here's the top of the list.

• Nothing but trouble / Michael McGarrity
• S is for silence / Sue Grafton
• A million little pieces / James Frey
• The year of magical thinking / Joan Didion
• The camel club / David Baldacci
• Predator / Patricia Cornwell
• The lighthouse / P. D. James
• Saving fish from drowning / Amy Tan
• Mary, Mary / Janes Patterson
• The city of falling angels / John Berendt
• On beauty : a novel / Zadie Smith
• Blink : the power of thinking without thinking / Malcolm Gladwell

A Million Little Corrections

For the last several months, Santa Fe readers have been standing in line for James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces. It was an Oprah book club pick, and people ask for it all the time. But is it really a memoir? It appears, based on recent news reports detailing investigations begun by the website The Smoking Gun, that the book's account of addiction and recovery is partially... um... made up.

Which, of course, wouldn't matter to anyone if it had presented itself as a novel, and may still not matter to readers who find the story meaningful. Books are often not what they seem, or as presented. Forrest Carter's wildly successful The Education of Little Tree (a true story) was not a memoir of a Cherokee boyhood, but a work of fiction. Edmund Morris's Dutch : a memoir of Ronald Reagan was 'told' by a fictional narrator, and some reviewers (and library catalogers) felt it would better be considered historical fiction. Danny Santiago, the hypothetical young Hispanic author of Famous All Over Town, turned out to be an established writer named Daniel James who had been blacklisted in the McCarthy era. Go Ask Alice was not the diary of an anonymous very young teen, but was produced by a woman named Beatrice Sparks. There was never a Carolyn Keene.

It will be interesting to see if the high profile attack on Frey's fidelity to fact will decrease the demand for the book.

Holiday Hours

The libraries will be closed on Monday, January 16, in observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. (We'll keep our normal hours over the weekend.)

The library's holiday calendar for 2006 has been posted on our web page. It is always available from both the news page and the About the Library page.

PS The usual reminder: the catalog, the magazine and newpaper databases, and the webpages never close. Available 24 x 7 x 365.

A Sea of Concrete

Southside Library. The southeast portion of the slab (main portion of the stacks area) was poured on January 5. The southwest portion of the slab (Young Adult Study Room) was poured on Monday January 9. The finishers were out power troweling and hand troweling. More radiant tubing has been placed, and the majority of the stem wall installation has been placed. Construction photos always available on the Southside Progress page.

Pre-School StoryTime

Registration is open for PreSchool StoryTime at La Farge. StoryTime meets on Tuesdays; the next cycle will begin on February 7 and run through April 25th. There will be two parallel sessions: Storytime for 2 & 3-year olds from 10:30 to 11 AM; Storytime for 4-5-6-year-olds from 10:30 to 11:15 AM.

For more information call the La Farge Children's Room at 955-4863.

Friendship and Memory

You probably saw it in the news: a librarian in London found a handwritten copy of a poem by Byron which is not otherwise known in manuscript. The story on BBC explains about the find and its context; the Guardian article includes the text and a (smallish) facsimile.
       It's big news all over the literary world. A search in Google on the first line of the poem, "Absent or present still to thee", yields hits on the story in many different languages...

ConduitMan

Work continues to progress at the Southside Library. We hope to have pictures of a big pour a little later this week.
       

Waterboro, Redwood City, and Green Lake

Among our favorite library blogs are Sites and Soundbytes (from the Caestecker Public Library in Green Lake, Wisconsin), the Waterboro Lib Blog, (Waterboro Public Library, Maine) and Redwood City (CA) Public Library's Liblog. Green Lake is a reliable source of interesting and useful websites, for example their New Years' post about Firefox Hacks You Must Have. Redwood City is strong on technological topics. And Waterboro does mostly literature, authors, books, but also informative websites and anything that catches their fancy. There are lots more worth a visit. Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library has a lively-looking new blog, PaperCuts.
       Waterboro, among other many other library blogs, pointed out all the year-end book lists at fimoculous. Sites and Soundbytes found a dynamite animated knot-tying site. La Grange Park (IL)'s Off the Shelves reminded us to post a link to the USPostal Service's new rate chart. (The rates went up today. You need $.02 more on those bills you forgot to mail yesterday.)

Taxpayer-Funded Research

Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) comes out at the beginning of every month. The new issue details developments in Open Access to taxpayer-funded research. There is a bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate in December which would REQUIRE open access to articles published in the Scientific/Technical/Medical journals if the research was funded by the Department of Health and Human Services. "Over half of the non-classified research funded by the federal government is funded by the Department of Health and Human Services."
       The bill got little press--attention being on other Congressional issues such as the ANWR flap and the renewal of the sunsetting provisions of the Patriot Act. But it is an issue of great importance to the scientific and scholarly communities, and to libraries and library users. This is knowledge the public has already paid for, largely locked up behind prohibitively high subscription prices, journals that cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars per year.

Nothing But Trouble

If you're not going to the Friends of the Library annual meeting on Sunday, you might want to turn up at Garcia Street Books. Michael McGarrity will be signing his tenth mystery, Nothing But Trouble, at 3 PM. Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia Street.
       McGarrity is a local superstar, and sets his stories in various areas around the state. This one takes place in the bootheel country. We've ordered six copies. Though the distributor usually manages to get hot new books to us at the same time they launch in stores, we haven't gotten our copies yet. But they will be here any minute, so go ahead and place your name on the waiting list.

Pencils, We Need Pencils (Again)

If you're cleaning out your desks, we could use your stray bits of pens and pencils... Just bring them to the reference desk at the Main Library, and we will shower you with gratitude.
       Old 3.5" diskettes, too. We can reformat them and give them to computer users whose time is up and who have no way to save their work...

Who Knew?

On the public librarians' email list, PubLib, we spent the last day or two of 2005 thinking up literary couples, to help out a colleague who hoped to make a display about them. Oh, there were the ones who work together (Stan & Jan Berenstain; the Thurlos, the Thoenes) and the ones well known in history (the Shelleys, the Brownings, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Leonard and Virginia Woolf). But the real fun was in the couples that elicited immediate return emails asking, "Really?"
       Here's a short sampling from a very long--and still growing--list:
   Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight
   Annick Smith and Bill Kittredge
   Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman
   Kathryn and Colin Harrison
   Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein
   Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan
   Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser
   Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin
   Jonathan Kellerman and Faye Kellerman
   Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne
   Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd
   Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
   Dashiell Hammett & Lillian Hellman
   Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller
   Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt
   Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer
   Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini
and, one for us old fogeys, Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford.
       Sorry not to give you catalog links for them all. It would take absolutely forever. Just enter whomever right here:

Author
Keyword
Subject
Title

Tolkien's 113th Birthday

Today would be J. R. R. Tolkien's 113th birthday. The really big occasion will have been two years ago when Tolkien-ites celebrated the author's eleventy-first (the age Bilbo was at the opening of The Hobbit)... "a rather curious number and a very respectable age for a hobbit."
       With the help of Chase's Calendar of Events, every day is a special day. Tomorrow is Sir Isaac Newton's birthday, and the earth is at perihelion, the point in its orbit when it is closest to the sun.

Friends of the Library Annual Meeting

The Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library will hold their Annual Meeting on Sunday, January 8th at 2:00 p.m. at the Main Library, 145 Washington Avenue.
       The public is invited to attend the naming of the Edward H. Tatum Community Room. The late Mr. Tatum was a generous supporter of the Library. He was a former librarian, author and bank president, serving as the president of the First National Bank of Santa Fe from 1962-1968 and 1971-1973.
       Immediately following the Annual Meeting, there will be a presentation by adventurer Greg Bemis. For the past 30 years Bemis has been a Director, Chairman and principal owner of The Ocean Corporation, the world's leading educational facility for commercial divers. He has carried on extensive research and investigation of two of the world's greatest maritime disasters, the Lusitania, sunk in 1915, and the Estonia, sunk in 1994. His interest in the oceans has been a guiding influence in his life.
       Refreshments will be served. The program is free and open to the public.

Prize-Winning Director :-)

Director of Libraries, Patricia Hodapp, won second place in the New Mexican's holiday essay contest. (Last year it was first place, but we're not bragging...)
       It was in the paper on Christmas Day, or you can read the story in the Proquest newspaper database (call the library for username and password.)